Category: Strategy/Vision

Yeah, surely we are inventing. Yes our rate on invention is better. If we invent more, shouldn’t this make new inventions easy? Better tools=Easier inventions? I feel we are a bit slow in past decade. I looked up http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm and it says 90,000 patent applications were made in 1963 and 400,000 in 2009. I believe that rate of inventions is not an arithematic progression (like 1000 new ones a month). It has to be a percentage increase (10% increase a month). And because things are invented to make life easier, it should also make life easier to invent more stuff. Thus making it a percentage growth. Inflation is a percentage growth, so are house prices. What are our people doing – just enjoying the benefits of inventions? Its ok to enjoy BBQ, new gadgets and stuff. But we should invent as well. Lets look at some examples:

Space journey: First rocket to enter into space was in 1944. We (humans) have landed on moon in 1969. So if it takes 25 years to get to moon, am I expecting too much to say we should have gone to mars by 1989 (+20 years). Established a colony in mars by 2000 and more?

Computers: I think computers have done a good job till 2000, they were growing at a good percentage rate. But hardware seems to have stopped. I remember Intel making a statement in early 2000s that home PCs we will surpass 10GHz processor in few years. Damn we are in 2010 and are struck in 3Mhz and just have to buy more processors to get more speed.

Transport: We got good cars they work, how much faster are they really going? Do we have any new vehicles that do better work? How much percentage is our flight time from Melbourne to London reducing by every year? Trains, yeah they are fast Melbourne to Sydney will be 3 hours soon. I think not real progress.

I think I will try and collect evidence that support my arguments in next few weeks. I am not convienced that we are inventing enough and we need to step up.

We seem to be a industry where many people believe that a person can only be good at technology or management. I have seen and worked with people who are good at both. I guess this is an opnion of mine, so I dont have conviencing proof at hand. Again this goes back to my core value “Impossible = I’m possible (you just need to find a space & ‘)”.

We know about managers who’s sole purpose is to getting work done. But are they leaders and who are leaders?

Leaders are people who will lead others by example. They help their team and show them how things can be achieved. Not necessarily doing the specialist skills but things like providing better environment to team, having a vision, passion and so on. Ideally we wish all managers are leaders. Leaders can exist at any level of the organization.

You often see people call some wow she/he is smart and he/she is dumb. But what is it that makes a person smart.

A smart person can solve their problems and even solve problems for others?
I think so.

So how does he do it?
Many might say “a person is smart or not, you cannot make a dumb person smart”. Well I want to challenge the word CANNOT.

So how exactly does a smart person solve problems?
Well see these key things:
@ intention to be smart, so it has long term benifits.
@ studying the problem and identifying the options that could change the outcome. This process need a lot of patience when you know nothing about it. I don’t believe time is a problem it’s paticence. Upon practice time taken will come down.
@ trying out some options. Failure of an option means it’s a new lesson. It’s better to learn from other peoples lessons
@ identifying some patterns and remembering them helps speed this process

Want to do this quicker?
@ Try to solve same problem differently
@ optimize continously
@ discuss with other about your approaches and understand their think process, solution is not the important aspect it’s the method to get to solution

Suddenly you realise how simple things get. You will be laughing at silly ways of your past thinking.

Everyone takes risks, I don’t see exceptions. We sit on a chair and there is a chance it may break. We stand but the ground may collapse. Yet we still stand.

I see this concept as risk and impact. Risk is the chance that certain event may happen. Like there is 50% chance that a coin flip turns out to be heads. Impact is confused with risk by many people. Impact is the amount of damage when the risk happens.

Example 1:
Sitting on chair.
Risk: it’s not often you see chair break but you do see it. Let’s say 1 in 2000 times.
Impact: if the chair breaks then we fall and there may be pain for maybe 2 days for me. Remember the same fall could have more impact on people with brittle bones. Let’s quantify this using pain-2days.

Example 2:
Taking a flight.
Risk: we do hear around 20-50 flights crashing a year. So it’s like say 1 in 7000.
Impact: the flight crashes and person may die. Family suffers the loss. So pain of 3years maybe. Mind you people will adapt to new way of life. Initially the pain maybe every second but eventually the frequency decreases. So impact is 3×365=1095. So impact is 3 years times number of suffers.

So ideally a persons decision making is dependant on risk x impact. So let’s say if the risk is 1% and impact is just 2 days of pain. Many people will take it. If you say risk is now 50% people may not. If we put risk back to 1% and say impact is breaking a leg, most people will avoid it.

P.S. In PM world they classify risk into two parts impact & probability. I think I would have confused PMs when i called probability as “risk”. Sorry

Wikipedia is big information source. It contains information about human knowledge. What if we can translate the text into Computer understandable data and use it to find solutions to current problems. I think it can solve at least 10 major problems on our planet. Say for example there are articles on wikipedia saying that hydrogen is in abundance in earth core and another article that says how to get inside earth core using say CoreDriller. When asked for alternative fuel source, the solver should be able to grab both the articles and tell user to use CoreDriller to get hydrogen and use it as alternative fuel source. Capture solar energy or reduce pollution. Invent less pollutant transport vehicle, find cures for diseases.